The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  As she speaks, something lightens in me—because I do remember his queasiness, the way he grimaced each time he swallowed. I even remember that, the next morning, when I screamed upon finding the note, when everyone but Andy came running, Dad looked unusually exhausted, his skin tinged with gray. And though I already told myself Elijah must be wrong, I still feel buoyant with relief at the memory.

  Until I think of Fritz.

  “So if you’re sure it wasn’t Dad, then that means it was Fritz. And you’re just chatting with him on the phone!”

  “We weren’t chatting,” she insists. “It was a very quick exchange.”

  “With a murderer!”

  “Stop it!” she says. “We don’t know that! Fritz has always been a… a very gentle man.”

  For a second, I feel the flare of pain in my ankle, the bruises Fritz left when he grabbed me yesterday. I found the marks last night as I peeled back my socks for bed, head still ringing with Elijah’s questions.

  “And if he’s guilty, then why would he call?” Mom continues, throwing up her hands. “It must be a misunderstanding—”

  “A misunderstanding! What exactly was misunderstood?”

  “I don’t know, Dahlia! Okay? I—” She shakes her head. “I hate to even think of it.”

  She puts her palms on the counter, looking at the marble so she won’t have to look at me.

  I don’t know this woman, the one averting her eyes. Where is the Lorraine Lighthouse who raised us? The one who used cooking twine on her own body to demonstrate how the Glamour Girl Slayer bound his victims. The one who planted herself, almost daily, on the staircase, face sad and stony as she stared at her parents.

  Mom has always been single-minded in her devotion to people who were murdered. Now, a day after learning that a serial killer kept his trophies beneath our shed, she’s choosing not to think of it, not to demand an explanation when a suspect calls our home.

  “But Mom—”

  “I can’t discuss this anymore!” she cries. “Not right now. Please, I’m… I’m exhausted.”

  She takes in the mess around her: the dirty dishes, the egg still shining on the floor, the cookies she only half packed up. Then she sighs so deeply it sounds like the crash of an ocean wave.

  “I’ll take care of this later,” she says. “I need to lie down for a bit.”

  She looks so tired that I feel a pull toward sleep myself. As she shuffles away, I ache to lie down, too. But Andy—always sleeping, never sleeping, from now until forever—needs me to keep pushing. For answers, for evidence, for something that will connect Fritz, without a doubt, to the room beneath the shed.

  I turn to the window, homing in on that building, its white brick choked by coils of ivy. A perimeter is marked by fresh yellow tape, tauter than the one that flaps around the family plot. And it’s there, near those little headstones, that something seizes my attention: a figure in dark clothes, hunched in the woods not twenty yards past those graves.

  A chill scampers up my spine. The figure is too small to be Elijah Kraft—or even his father, a knee-jerk option I consider. I try to see the person more clearly, but they remain just a blur of black among the trees.

  I rush to the hall closet, push past coats to the shelf in the back, and I grab the binoculars that look as if they haven’t been moved since the last time Andy and I used them. Grief gushes up, quick and acidic, but I swallow it down, hurrying back to the kitchen.

  I aim the lenses into the woods until I catch a hazy glimpse of the person’s dark clothes. Inching the binoculars into the right spot, I twist the knob until the world clicks into perfect focus—and then I gasp.

  For a moment, I’m hurtled back in time. It’s Ruby, crouching on our property, just like she did when we were kids.

  But that’s not what startled me.

  Yards from the place where Andy’s body was discovered, Ruby Decker, clutching a shovel, is digging a hole for something.

  Or she’s digging something up.

  thirteen

  I’ve barely shrugged my coat on before I’m out the door, calling Ruby’s name. The wind snatches my voice, blowing it back toward the house, and in the distance, Ruby stabs her shovel into the ground, so focused on digging that she doesn’t even hear me.

  I’m jogging toward her, closing the space between us, but when I reach the crime scene tape, it stops me like a finish line.

  Now I’m rooted here, close enough to really see it—the spot where Andy was buried—and my throat is burning, my lungs are heaving; the air is thin and not enough.

  Ruby’s shovel whispers against the dirt, jerking me back to her intrusion. I hear the ocean breathe, its endless in and out, and even though Andy hated all the water locking us in, I soothe myself with its sound.

  Steady again, I veer around the grave and march the remaining yards to Ruby, who won’t stop digging, still oblivious to my approach. When she pulls back her arms to pierce the ground again, I grab the end of the shovel and yank it toward me, forcing her off-balance.

  “Hey!” she protests.

  “What are you doing?” I demand. “Why are you here?”

  But she keeps going, frantically tossing soil to the side. Moments later, when her shovel clangs against something, Ruby drops to the ground. She flings the shovel away and claws at the dirt until a patch of silver appears. Slowly, carefully, like she’s excavating a fossil, she reaches into the earth and extracts a tin box. She rests it on her lap, skimming her fingers across it but leaving it unopened.

  “What is that?” I ask. “How did you know it was here?”

  “I put it here,” she says softly.

  “Why? What’s in it?”

  The wind circles us as I wait for her to speak. Dead leaves whirl.

  “Andy’s birthday present,” she says, and I pull in a surprised breath.

  She shakes the box and something slides inside it. “I gave it to him that night,” she continues, before adding an indignant huff. “I probably shouldn’t have bothered. I knew, before he even opened it, that he was distracted. Holding that key. Fidgeting with it.”

  She whips her gaze up at me. “What was down there? Under the shed.”

  I shift my feet, struggling not to see it: painted toenails, collarbone tattoo, a bolt of red hair. Ruby waits for me to answer, eyes wide and alert, but I can’t bring myself to tell her. More than that, there’s something in the way she watches me, so eager so soon after crying, that makes me think I shouldn’t. Elijah said he wasn’t going public yet, and no matter how good of friends she was with Andy, Ruby wasn’t one of us. It isn’t her right to know.

  “It’s just a basement,” I lie.

  Ruby’s brows pinch together. She cranes her neck to look toward the shed, its perimeter of police tape bright and unavoidable.

  “The cops were here,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I admit. “They were searching the shed.” My heart drums as I deepen the lie. “Seeing if there were clues about Andy. Since it’s so close to where he was found.”

  She squints at me, skeptical, but I nudge my chin toward her box. “What was the present?”

  She lingers on me for another moment. Then she drops her attention toward her lap, smoothing her hand over the box’s lid before sliding it off. “I made it for him,” she says.

  She sinks her hand into a froth of tissue paper to pull out something familiar, an embroidery in a wooden hoop. I recognize the pattern of flowers from the one hanging in her living room: Ruby loves Grandpa, it said. This one is almost identical—same perimeter of yellow and purple hollyhocks, same white fabric, same navy thread for the letters. In fact, if not for one altered word, I’d think this was the one from Ruby’s wall.

  But that altered word: it’s a name, actually.

  Ruby loves Andy.

  “It was supposed to be a kind of confession,” she says.

  I sink down beside her, feeling punched, lungless, just looking at the letters of Andy’s name. They’re so smooth, so grace
ful, so unlike the ones he carved into my wall, or the inside of the credenza, or the handle of his ax. Those were skinny and sharp, quick cuts in the wood that surprised me a little when they didn’t bleed. But these—Ruby took her time with these. And I don’t know why it’s knocked the wind out of me, seeing his name like that, painstakingly stitched.

  “I was in love with him,” she says, pushing her hair out of her face as the wind tousles it. “That’s probably not a surprise. But it was a risk, giving him this, even though I was pretty sure he felt the same.”

  “Did he?” I hear myself ask. Because there are things I knew about Andy without him having to say a word: when his stomach hurt; when something simmered in his veins, ready to send him straight for his ax. And there are things he ran out of time to tell me: what he knew about the Blackburn Killer, what he saw beneath the shed. But him loving Ruby—that doesn’t fall into either category.

  “What made you think he loved you?” I say. I try to sound neutral, but I understand there’s cruelty in asking.

  She narrows her eyes at me. “You know we were together, right? You know we weren’t just friends?”

  I’m still for a moment. But then I straighten my spine, wanting to look as tall as a kneeling person can. “Andy never had a girlfriend.”

  She laughs at me, dryly. “He might not have used that word,” she says. “But we were each other’s first kiss. First… everything, really.”

  I shake my head, dizzy with the revelation, this piece of his life he never let me know. Did he keep it a secret because he didn’t believe I could take it? Because he knew I didn’t understand how to love, how to trust someone, outside the two of us? My eyes burn, remembering how he told Ruby I was too closed off to hang out with them. Closed off. Like an empty room. Like a dead-end road.

  “It was supposed to be cute,” Ruby says, “telling him I love him like this.” She traces the embroidery with her finger. “He liked the one in my living room, so I just thought…” She trails off, seconds passing before she continues. “But he got weird as soon as he opened it. He said that I didn’t love him, that I couldn’t. That I didn’t even really know him.”

  I feel a spike of satisfaction: See? This closeness was all in her mind. But when I notice her crumpled expression, like Andy’s rejection is happening now, I swallow my meanness down.

  “I told him that wasn’t true,” she continues. “That I did love him, I wanted a life with him, off this island, just like we’d talked about.” She stares off into the trees in a vacant way that reminds me of Dad’s dead deer. “I even told him I wanted us to get married someday. Start a family together. I wanted to have loads of kids—I still do—so I’d never, never be lonely.”

  For a moment, I want to laugh. The notion is so absurd: fifteen-year-old Ruby planning a permanent future with Andy, picking out kids’ names, writing them down like ingredients for a recipe. But the moment passes quickly, and the next one wallops me—thinking of children with Andy’s crinkly eyes, his cowlick he could never keep down. Would his kids have crouched in credenzas, making mischief in the dark? Would they have felt, just a little bit, like mine? The possibilities are a dull blade, taking too long to slice me open.

  “That’s when he really freaked out,” Ruby says. She sets the embroidery back onto the tissue paper. “He was like, ‘Family? You think I can start a family?’ He said it proved how much I didn’t know about him. Or where he came from. How unnatural your family is—”

  I tense at that: Andy’s word in her mouth.

  “—how any kid of his was bound to be unnatural, too. He went on and on like that: ‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ Which was so stupid. So insulting. Like I’m supposed to believe he’s, like, a vampire or something.”

  “Vampire?” I repeat.

  Ruby shrugs. “That’s what he was acting like. Like he was some evil creature destined to do bad things. I mean, what kind of thing is that to say? ‘Who knows what’s in my blood?’ ”

  She’s right. It’s an odd, almost eerie concern, one I never heard him express.

  “He’d talk all the time about us leaving this place, and then the second I tell him I love him, he’s not sure he can build a life with me? What else had we been doing all those months, if not planning for a future together?”

  She hangs her head, her voice so quiet, so fragile, I have to lean in to hear her.

  “Anyway, I ran off after that, taking his stupid present back home. But I grabbed the key first, like I told you—because that was the infuriating thing. He was yelling at me, refusing to let me love him, and the whole time, he was only half there. The other half was thinking about that damn key. Or what it opened.”

  Her earlier question idles in her eyes. What was down there? Under the shed. I have to work harder this time to pretend like the answer is nothing.

  “So why is the embroidery here?” I ask. “Why did you bury it? In our woods.”

  “I had to hide it from my grandfather,” she says. Then she sighs. “Andy broke my heart that night. So when I got home, I was a mess. And when Grandpa came to my room to check on me, I couldn’t stop sobbing. I was lying on my floor, in a pile of Andy’s notes—you know, the ones we’d write together, the funny little phrases? I’d kept them all.” She wipes her nose before rubbing her fingers on her jeans. “And Grandpa was like, ‘What’s all this? What’s got you so upset?’ And I was so sick of hiding that I loved someone. I knew that was Grandpa’s biggest fear: that I would fall in love and leave him. Just like my mother. Just like his wife. But I couldn’t fake it anymore. That love is who I was right then. Do you know what I mean?”

  Her question reaches into me, tugging at my starkest truth. Because yes. I do know what she means. My love for Andy is who I’ve always been.

  I can’t say that, though. My throat is a closed fist. So I nod, encouraging her to go on.

  “I showed him the notes. They didn’t make sense to him; they were all like your hair is made of wishes and salad forks. Silly phrases that no one had ever thought of but us. But I told Grandpa what they meant: we’d had a relationship, we’d loved each other. Or so I thought.”

  She pulls the embroidery out of the box and scrapes at the thread with dirty nails. It’s as if she’s trying to unstitch the letters, unwrite her love for Andy after all these years.

  “So I thought,” she repeats, the words even wryer this time.

  My voice is pinched when I speak. “I think you just… you caught Andy at a bad time.”

  She glares at me. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, just—” I force a shrug. “You know how he was, right? With the trees? Sometimes, some… bad feelings came over him, and he had to hurt something to get them out. I just think that, that night, that something was you.”

  She bites her lip, considering. “But it was his birthday. Your siblings had come back to celebrate. What bad feelings could he possibly have had?”

  I see the photographs again: the dark B on an ankle, someone’s skin singed from the brand.

  Where did the brand end up? I wonder if it was part of what Andy found when he hacked open the chest, if it was with him that final night, in his pocket maybe; if when his clothes decomposed in that awful grave, the soil swallowed it down, deeper than the police would later dig.

  Instead, they dug for it in our house.

  I focus on Ruby. “Families are complicated,” I say. “It was the first time we’d all been together in eight years. It could have easily stirred up frustration. Resentment.”

  She doesn’t seem convinced. “When I asked him if he really didn’t want me to love him, he said, ‘I don’t want you to love me.’ No hesitation. He made his feelings perfectly clear.”

  She picks at the embroidery again, scraping a tight thread. “So I told Grandpa what happened: I loved Andy, we’d talked about leaving, I thought we’d make a life together, but he’d rejected me. And then Grandpa—he got so mad. He grabbed some of the notes a
nd, like, shook them in his fist, mumbling that he was going to get that Lighthouse boy.”

  I recoil at the phrase. “Get him,” I repeat. My skin tingles with unease.

  “I’d never seen him so enraged,” Ruby continues. “But more than that, he seemed hurt. Reading those notes, he could see we’d been close. And I tried to tell him: I wasn’t my mom, or my grandma; loving Andy didn’t mean I loved him any less—but the next thing I know, he’s storming out of my room, slamming the front door, and I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.”

  All at once, the ocean and wind crescendo, and in them, I hear the snarl of her grandfather’s voice, hissing at me how Andy deserved what he got. When he said it, I was shocked by how heartless, how hateful, he sounded.

  But what if he was even worse than that?

  I comb through my memories, trying to gather what I know of Lyle. Turns out, it isn’t much, only what I’ve learned from Ruby the past few days: he’s extremely protective of his granddaughter, he didn’t like Andy, and he’s been sick for almost a decade.

  But now, my mouth falls open, the word decade resonating inside me like a struck bell. The same length of time since Andy was killed.

  Since Jessie Stanton, too.

  In an instant, my mind whips toward something else, something I completely forgot in yesterday’s tangle of horrors: Lyle used to warn Ruby to stay away from our property. But not only that. Don’t go anywhere near the Lighthouses’ shed, he told her.

  When she relayed that story, I couldn’t make sense of it. How would he have known about it? Why would he care? But now, pushing these pieces into place, I almost groan.

  What if Lyle was the Blackburn Killer? What if the victims ended at Jessie Stanton because he grew too sick, too weak, to murder anyone else?

  I focus in again on Ruby, who’s still talking.

  “… and I realized a couple days later that if Grandpa saw the embroidery, he’d probably get even madder. I kept thinking, Maybe Andy will change his mind. So I didn’t want to make things worse for us by having Grandpa stumble upon this. I was already thinking of how I could backtrack, tell Grandpa I was being stupid that night, that I’d had a crush and it was over. But this”—she picks up the wooden hoop and immediately drops it back in the box—“Ruby loves Andy? Made to look exactly like the one I made Grandpa? He’d see it as a betrayal. That I’d replaced him somehow. That I was still set on leaving him.”